In the space below, I’ve included some of my take-aways from the book, stuff that struck my fancy in Chapters 1 and 2, and included my reflections/comments in square brackets [really? that’s unbelievable!]. Feel free to swipe the images highlighting key points and repost them everywhere! Read blog entries relevant to this book. Note that my notes imperfectly capture some of the main ideas in the book. I heartily recommend reading the text!!

My Notes from Chapters 5:

Chapter 5 – Using Digital Media to READY Students for Learning: Preparing Learners to Acquire Key Knowledge and Skills

Teachers need to reflect on the following questions:

Begin with the end in mind. What do students know and be able to do by the end of instructional cycle?

How can multiple modalities most effectively be incorporated into instruction?

How can students move through Bloom’s higher levels, analyzing, evaluating and creating?

What instructional strategies most effectively direct students toward reaching the goal of independently demonstrating their learning?

What resources will be used?

What assessment strategies/tools will be employed?

Will rubrics be used?

How do you activate engagement, motivation and interest?

By charging students with tasks that require creativity, analysis, and applications, teachers move the focus away from themselves to an emphasis upon their learners.

Student-centered products enable learners to showcase their new knowledge and skills in relation to a particular topic in an infinite variety of ways. Examples [love these examples!!] include:

Building a website that demonstrates their content knowledge.

Constructing a multimedia presentation to teach learned content to others.

Creating a newsletter or flyer that highlights key findings on a given topic.

Producing a stop-motion video that displays a process or procedure.

Designing a cartoon strip that highlights important findings in a unique way.

Creating a digital story to describe reflections on a particular topic.

Producing a Sketchcast demonstrating mater of a topic or concept through narration, text, sketches.

Research about how students learn is shared, including Piaget, Curran and Bruner.

Bruner’s theoretical framework describes learning as an active process in which learners construct their newfound knowledge using concepts derived from previous experience.

The learner selects and transforms information, creates hypotheses, and arrives at decisions based on a cognitive structure (mental model or schema), which adds meaning and organization to the experience and enables him or her to perform the information given.

“If students are not paying attention, they are not engaged; and, hence, they are not learning” (Wolfe, 2001).

When stimuli are ignored, the brain begins to shut down inputs from that particular source. However, if the brain is primed for additional incoming information, the learner is more likely to perceive this input.

Selective attention of the brain depends on suppression of irrelevant data and amplification of meaningful data (Jenson, 1998).

When emotional or personal stimuli are present, attention is more powerfully gasped.

A TEASe’s storyline is composed of visual and audio pieces to activiate prior knowledge, very broadly stitched together with short lines of text to guide viewing.

TEASes that include elements of pop culture and music relevant to students’ lives most powerfully engage learners.

Should not be used to deliver content to learners, rather, TEASes help students focus their attention and interest at the beginning of a unit, even before the content is delivered.

Narrative messages wield tremendous influence in changing the attitudes and beliefs of audiences. They allow for a specific reading or viewing experience. They transport recipients into the narrative world, personally involving them cognitively and emotionally.

TEASes provide a unique opportunity by which to ready students for learning.

Quick Reflections:

Wow, loved this chapter! Leaving behind the copyright concerns of Chapter 4, it strikes at the jugular of creating engaging content! I loved the examples provided, research regarding engagement (which is so often discarded as “Tough, life isn’t always fun and engaging. kids should pay attention if they want to get good jobs!”), and the TEASe activity. This last item reminds me of problem narrative or problem engagement activities in PBL/PrBL.

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure